The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Wednesday, January 30, 2013

I have more to tell about “Eve Innocenti”, the
mother whose struggles for contact with her children I discussed at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-attachment-therapist-wears-two-hats.html
and elsewhere. I think now I should have named her “Josefine K.”, because her
situation is becoming more and more reminiscent of The Trial, with its unstated accusations, empty courtroom, and
efforts to make the protagonist punish himself.

As some readers will remember, Eve had two sons
while living in Colorado. The boys had different fathers, but only one of the
fathers was in the picture, and he and a new partner offered occasional care to
both boys. Several years ago, Eve left the children with that couple while
traveling-- and when she returned found
that they refused to let her take the boys home. (Note, by the way, that while
the older boy was the son of the man caring for him, the younger boy was not biologically related to
either of the caregivers.) Eve remained in the state of Colorado for some time,
during which period she sought legal and judicial help that would allow her
contact with her children, and preferably physical custody-- but without much success.

Eve married and moved out of the state with her new
husband. She continued to try to work with Colorado authorities and found that
she was being accused of having neglected and abused the boys earlier. She was
assigned an attorney to represent her interests, but found and still finds that
this person does not return calls nor apprise her of court dates. Meanwhile,
the children’s “stepmother” (not legally, but for all practical purposes)
enlisted the help of a local practitioner of Attachment Therapy, who began to
serve not only as the children’s therapist but as an evaluator communicating
with the court—an ethically questionable combination.

In Attachment Therapy, a stated goal is to remove
attachment to a previous caregiver, and to establish attachment to a new adult.
The tenets of AT suggest that this is to be accomplished in part by requiring a
child to agree with and repeat statements about the abusive or neglectful
treatment of the early caregiver, and to express rage against that person as instructed.
Through this procedure, any child cooperating with AT will say that a caregiver
was abusive. Statements made in this way by Eve’s children were the apparent
source of abuse accusations against her—the accusations that are being used as
an argument in favor of preventing her from having contact with the children,
and eventually of terminating her parental rights. (Eve has never been told
what the accusations against her actually are, so she cannot defend herself;
instead of telling her, Colorado authorities suggested that she make a list of
all the bad things she had done, and they would check those against what the
boys were reported to have said.)

Paradoxically, when AT practitioners wish to foster
an attachment between a child and a new caregiver, one of their tools is to
separate an uncooperative child from the current caregiver and to send him or
her to “respite care”, where treatment is austere and minimally enjoyable. This
treatment has been used with Eve’s older son, in contradiction to the conventional
view that attachment is encouraged by increased pleasurable social interaction
with an adult caregiver. He apparently disliked this treatment very much.

A month or so ago, Eve came to the conclusion that
for her own sake and that of the children, since the termination of her
parental rights seemed to be unavoidable, she might do well to relinquish her rights.
This action would make the children both adoptable by their stepmother, and
enable the father of the older boy able to adopt the younger one. Eve and her
husband have spent all their savings, but their income is too large to make
them eligible for legal aid, and without counsel they have no idea how to
pursue the matter any farther.
Relinquishment could reduce the difficulties the children are presently
going through, Eve thought.

But no! A telephone call from the Colorado
authorities has advised Eve that she cannot relinquish. To do so, she would
have to be available for counseling about relinquishment, and as she lives in a
different state, this is not possible. The children’s caseworker has said that
it is only a matter of time until her parental rights are terminated, in any
case. In addition to its Kafkaesque features, this makes the case take on aspects
of the judgment of Solomon-- if Solomon
had said, “All right, this mother gives up, but let’s cut the child in half
anyway”, but instead of cutting, subjected the child to abusive practices
labeled as psychotherapy.

What does the law actually say about this situation?
According to S.N. Katz’s book Family Law
in America (Oxford University Press, 2011), “Federal guidelines [the Adoption
and Safe Families Act of 1997] mandate that a state make reasonable efforts to prevent
the removal of children from their families except in the most aggravated
circumstances of abuse. The goal is to insure that parental rights are respected,
on the one hand, and the best interest of the child is served, on the other.”

The law [Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act,
amended 1996] also requires that in child protection proceedings the child must
have independent counsel. An attorney representing the child is not the same as
a guardian ad litem (GAL). As Katz
notes, “The difference between an attorney for the child and a GAL is… that the
attorney represents the child whereas the GAL represents the GAL’s opinion as
to the child’s best interests.”

Neither of these two legal requirements has been met
in Eve’s children’s case. Of course, it is an awkward case because of the
different relationships of the two children to their present caregivers. In the
case of the older boy, he is living with one biological parent, and the only
question about the situation is how his relationship with his birth mother is
to be handled. In the case of the younger boy, neither of the present
caregivers is biological kin, so the roles of both of them, in addition to the
connection with the birth mother, require legal examination.

Eve and her children need legal counsel, but they
appear to be captives of the Attachment Therapy belief system as it has taken
over a county’s practices. They will not get the counsel they are entitled to
from the county, nor will they get any explanations or opportunities to deal with
accusations. I have suggested that Eve
contact the American Civil Liberties Union for help in a situation where government
is interfering with citizens’ rights.

Friday, January 25, 2013

I am writing to you because of your involvement with
the congressional adoption coalition and because of your recent attempts to
communicate with the Russian authorities about the adoption ban. I want to
comment on some issues that have rarely been mentioned in connection with the
ban. Sad though the Russian decision was for some American families and some
waiting children, it may offer us an opportunity to examine factors affecting
the success of both foreign and domestic
adoptions in this country.

The Russian legislation was named for Dima Yakovlev,
a toddler adopted from Russia who died a tragic but purely accidental death. It
would more appropriately have been named for children like Viktor Matthey and
Nathan Craver, or others who died as a result of systematic maltreatment of a
type advised or countenanced by some adoption caseworkers and educators.

Popular sources of information about adoption and
Internet sites such as www.focusonthefamily.com
and www.attach-china.org
have to a considerable extent been hijacked by an unconventional,
non-evidence-based view of emotional attachment and treatment of mental
illness. This perspective claims that all emotional disturbance derives from
poor attachment experiences, and that adoptive parents can cause children to
become attached to them by displaying their power and authority. In order to
display authority, parents must make children completely dependent on them and
obedient to them; children may eat and drink only as parents allow them, must
not use the toilet without asking, and may be kept in cold or uncomfortable
sleeping arrangements, including cages. Such treatment is physically as well as
mentally unhealthy and accounts for the frequent findings of malnutrition in deaths
of adopted children.

Because Internet sources present these types of
maltreatment as appropriate for adopted children, adoptive parents may have
become convinced of this misinformation before they ever receive the
pre-adoptive training required under the Hague Convention. Whether their
pre-adoptive education contradicts or confirms their beliefs may make the
difference between mistreatment of adoptive children and appropriate treatment.
Unfortunately, evidence from education of social workers, CASAs, and GALs
suggests that in some cases the mistaken beliefs may be confirmed rather than
contradicted.

How can the U.S. alter this situation so that
adopted children from all countries are safer? As I suggested in a letter to
Pavel Astakhov two years ago, an important step would be to review pre-adoption
training materials. I would like to see this done for all pre-adoption
education, but in light of the Russian ban this may be the time to begin with
materials from agencies that work with foreign adoptions. I don’t believe that
such a process can constitutionally be created by Federal legislation, and I
believe that state legislation would be strongly resisted by groups like the
ones I mentioned earlier. However, it should be possible for a congressional
committee to request co-operation from agencies that deal with foreign
adoptions and to have their materials vetted by independent scholars.

What I suggest here would obviously be only a first
step, but it may be an essential one
both toward improving the outlook for adopted children and toward convincing
the Russians that the ban is unnecessary.

Sincerely yours,

Jean Mercer,Ph.D.

Professor Emerita of Psychology, Richard Stockton
College

NOTE: Senator Landrieu's office answered this the day after it was sent, with a form letter in which the Senator deplored the conditions of children in Russia.I was recently interviewed on this issue by the Russian magazine Za Rubezhom. Perhaps Senator Landrieu's staff will read about the matter there. J.M.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

When tests are developed for medical or
psychological disorders, the idea is usually this: There is a disorder that can
be identified. However, it may be difficult and complicated to identify it in
the usual ways, or it may be desirable to identify it when only a few vague
symptoms have appeared, in order to treat it early and keep it from getting
worse. A medical or psychological test is a way of measuring a sample of
behavior or biological functioning that will help predict whether a disorder is
developing, or that can be an effective substitute for difficult, intrusive ,
and time-consuming examination of other kinds. Effective tests are very useful
in ruling out problems that the symptoms might suggest but that are not really
present, and thus allowing appropriate treatment to be chosen without waste of
time.

But the tricky part about tests is that even the
good ones are not always right. They may result in false positives and indicate the presence of a problem when there
really is none. They may also result in false
negatives and show that there is no disorder—but later events demonstrate
that the disorder was actually there. Even the best tests show some false
positives and some false negatives. The practical goal is not to get rid of all
of these, but to be able to state how often they occur, and to interpret
results in the light of that information.

Test development is a complicated and tedious matter
in which small errors may ruin the value of extensive efforts. For example, an
imprecise or erroneous definition of a disorder can result in an ineffective
test. Test developers must work hard to exclude sources of bias, especially if
diagnosis of the disorder has more than a small reliance on subjective
opinions. Persons who perform or even know the diagnosis given to a participant
must not also be the ones who perform or score the test, for fear that their
beliefs will inadvertently influence the ways they administer or interpret the
test. If a diagnosis depends on the examiner’s opinion rather than an objective
measurement, it’s important to have several examiners make independent
assessments, and to ascertain the extent to which they agree. If a test has not
been developed following these and other guidelines, it cannot be trusted.
Tests should be regarded with suspicion if they have not been published in
peer-reviewed journals, whose expert reviewers will have done some of the work
of assessing the test’s credentials. Transparency of reporting is the key to
test selection; tests that are published privately by their developers, and
whose background is not available to the reader, should be approached warily.

How does all this relate to the issue of testing for
Reactive Attachment Disorder? There are presently no thoroughly-validated tests
for this disorder-- and one reason is
that the condition remains only incompletely defined, and has somewhat
different descriptions in DSM (the standard U.S. listing of mental disorders)
and ICD (the European manual).

Nonetheless, some American practitioners, especially
those who advocate the use of “holding therapy” for children diagnosed with
Reactive Attachment Disorder, choose as a diagnostic test the Randolph
Attachment Disorder Questionnaire (RADQ), an instrument self-published by
Elizabeth Randolph. The validating information claimed for the RADQ by Randolph
has never been published in any peer-reviewed journal, and the one related
article in a peer-reviewed journal (by Cappelletty et al) concluded that scores
on the RADQ did not correlate with any validated test for childhood emotional
disturbance. Beyond that, however, it is notable that Randolph herself stated
plainly in her self-published work that the RADQ was not intended as a test for Reactive Attachment Disorder, but
instead was an assessment of a different, suppositious disorder never described
in any peer-reviewed publication. Whatever Randolph intended to test, in any
case, she failed to guard against bias in her results by herself doing both the
job of subjective diagnosis and that of performing and scoring the test.
Although her publication includes a report of an analysis of variance on the
test results, it does not state how many false positives or false negatives
occurred. This raises the question whether there were no such false results,
simply because both the original diagnosis and the test result were in each
case formulated by Randolph, who agreed with herself strongly in her assessment
of each child; this of course is a far cry from having test scores that are
validated by their agreement with an independent diagnosis.

The RADQ should be excluded as a possible diagnostic
tool for Reactive Attachment Disorder first
on the showing of its own developer, who did not intend it to do that job, and
second on the basis of its complete lack of conformity to normal guidelines for
test development. That neither false positives nor false negatives have been
reported is a statement not of the effectiveness of the test, but of a failure
to consider a basic testing issue.

What then? Are there any standardized tests for
Reactive Attachment Disorder? Helen Minnis, a Scottish psychiatrist, has been
working for a number of years to try to develop such an assessment, but
although she has created evaluative methods, she has no standardized brief test.
In a 2009 paper with a group of colleagues (An exploratory study of the
association between reactive attachment disorder and attachment narratives in
early school-age children. Journal of
Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 50(8), 931-942), Minnis described the
complications and difficulties of this work, beginning with the lack of clarity
in descriptions of the disorder: “Although the concept of RAD is encapsulated
in psychiatric classification systems… the research base is scant, particularly
in relation to school-age children… In this paper, we use the term RAD as in
DSM to cover both the ‘inhibited’ and the ‘disinhibited’ phenotypes… The DSM
and ICD systems both define RAD as being associated with early maltreatment and
characterized by disinhibited behavior (indiscriminate sociability) or
inhibited (withdrawn, hypervigilant) behaviors.” Minnis goes on to point out
that there is not much consensus about the effect of changes with age on RAD,
and that one system includes attention-getting and aggression toward self and
others among the symptoms. Minnis pointed out that research has indicated that
children may show symptoms of RAD and also be evaluated as securely attached to
caregivers. (Does this suggest that in fact Reactive Attachment Disorder has
nothing to do with attachment? See below—J.M.)

Children in the Minnis study were referred because
of symptoms noticed by social workers and mental health teams, but not because
of evidence of pathogenic care. Thirty-three children diagnosed with RAD on the basis of interviews
and observations were compared to 37 children matched on age and sex but not
diagnosed with RAD. Working with an
extensive protocol rather than a brief test like the RADQ, Minnis looked for
shared characteristics of children diagnosed with RAD. Minnis and her
colleagues concluded that their findings “reinforce the conclusions from other
literature that RAD is a phenomenon different in kind from attachment specific
behaviors…. RAD can perhaps be seen as one of the pervasive disorders of social
impairment…”.

Minnis’s work suggests that a brief test diagnosing
RAD is not going to be possible in the near future. Beyond that, Minnis and her
colleagues point out the possibility that RAD is not about attachment in any
ordinary sense of the term. I would note that this finding implies that efforts
to destroy or create attachments are essentially irrelevant to treatment of RAD--
in contradiction to the belief systems of persons who currently use the
RADQ.

Friday, January 18, 2013

As you might expect, people in the helping
professions want to help. Physicians, nurses, social workers, psychologists,
occupational therapists—although they may have other motives too, they probably
won’t stay in those professions long unless one of their goals is giving help.
And because they really want to help others, they may be quite vulnerable to
propaganda in the form of attempts to persuade them that certain methods are safe
and effective. Even if there is no good evidence to support such claims,
helping professionals may accept persuasive material enthusiastically and unsuspiciously, to the
unfortunate detriment of their clients’ conditions. This situation is
especially problematic if propaganda is generated by pharmaceutical companies
or by proponents of alternative methods, who stand to profit if they can
persuade the helping professional to use their proffered techniques.

In Propaganda in
the helping professions (Oxford University Press, 2012), Eileen Gambrill, a
social worker with a long history of concern about methods in her own
profession, warns patients and practitioners of the potential dangers of
persuasive messages about treatments, and describes at length some necessary
skills for identifying and resisting propaganda. Densely informative, with 500
closely-printed pages of information and argument, Gambrill’s book presents
ideas and methods which most people in the helping professions have been
exposed to-- but did not necessarily
catch. Like many abstractions, these ideas are easily forgotten, and most of us
benefit from periodic reviews of material we recognize but don’t easily recall.
Gambrill’s almost encyclopedic book will not be read straight throughby many, but can be dipped into
frequently with benefit to professionals and to patients who want to take some
control over their treatment. Readers will find the extensive bibliography
helpful, the endnotes both entertaining and informative, and the entire
publication characterized by personal, opinionated, and even pejorative views
(Gambrill refers to the American Psychiatric Association as “fellow travelers”
of the pharmaceutical industry, for example).

An important section is one that restates a point
discussed frequently over the last several years: that both practitioners and
patients understand risks and benefits of events better when statements are in “natural”
terms (e.g., 3 cases of breast cancer out of 1123 women) rather than in
proportions or percentages. The ratios are the same, however they are stated,
but the medium influences the reception of the message. Gambrill works out
several problems using natural statements of numbers and shows how intuitive
responses to reports of percentages may be quite different from responses when
specific numbers are provided, with possible effects on our conclusions about
the effects of treatments.

Several sections of the book focus on rhetorical or
logical factors as they influence a message’s persuasiveness. For example, Gambrill
discusses fallacies of irrelevance and the frequency with which they are used
in propaganda about medical and psychological treatments. Indeed, defense of statements
with comments that are ad hominem (about
a speaker) rather than ad rem (about
the topic) is a technique that is almost diagnostic of propaganda in the
helping professions and elsewhere. For myself, I find it useful to review types
of fallacies from time to time--
remembering the names helps me to identify examples that I read or hear,
and assures me that others would find the statements fallacious as well.
Gambrill’s book presents a thorough review, and includes a warning against the possibility
of “self-propaganda”, the tendency to persuade ourselves of beliefs that in
fact we cannot support.

Propaganda
in the helping professions is a book full of good things, but it
is not precisely a “good book”; there is more to a good book than a series of
good sections. Gambrill’s book would have benefited greatly from an experienced
editor who could have tightened up the text and revealed an underlying
structure that is presently obscured by details. In addition, the production
phase seems to have been skimped, leaving the text sprinkled with puzzling
uncorrected typos of the kind that spell-check either caused or failed to fix.
These include sentences where punctuation seems to have gone agley, leaving the
reader to figure out what happened to the shoots and leaves.

I was left with unresolved concern about a point in
Gambrill’s book. As she has done elsewhere, she refers to the Citizens
Commission on Human Rights as a “watchdog group”, together with the American Civil Liberties Union and Advocacy
(sic) for Children in Therapy.
Overleaf (not her fault, of course), Gambrill notes that the CCHR was
established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology. It can’t be denied that the
CCHR is indeed a watchdog group--- but
its Scientology affiliation surely raises questions about who should be
watching the watchmen. Here, where I would have expected one of the references
to “fellow travelers” found elsewhere in the text, I see no comments at all.
Does Gambrill presently consider the CCHR and the ACLU to be equivalent in
roles and purposes? Or is this simply a
result of cutting and pasting of an unwieldy mass of material? I’d like to
know, and I’d like this flaw to be corrected, so it doesn’t steal attention
from the rest of Gambrill’s valuable contribution.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Attachment theory,
as formulated decades ago by John Bowlby, is a framework for understanding how
human social interactions and relationships develop from infancy onward. Any
theory works to pull together observations or other data on a topic and to
suggest how they are connected with each other. Attachment theory deals with
observable aspects of social relationships such as the apparent indifference of
infants in the first months to contact with strangers, the quickly-developing
preference for familiar people and fear of separation or strangers as infants reach the end of the first year, the use of
contacts with familiar people to help toddlers explore and learn, and the
associations between early social experiences and adult attitudes toward other
people.

Attachment theory, as it is conventionally
understood, has been tested and revised as thousands of empirical studies have
examined it. This is not the case, however, for an “alternative” view of
emotional development that also uses the term attachment, but is in fact a
matter of attachment myths.

The organization “Focus on the Family” appears to
have bought into prevalent attachment myths. Although materials on its web site
reference John Bowlby and attachment theory, it is in fact the myths that are
repeated. Advice to parents given by “Focus
on the Family” is based on attachment myths, not on attachment theory.

Here is one example, taken from http://www.focusonthefamily.com/parenting/adoptive_families/attachment_and_bonding/new_definition_of_attachment-regulation.aspx.
. The FoF author, Debi Grebenik, says this: “Children (biological or adopted)
who do not get their needs met as babies and small children typically do not
form a strong attachment with their parents. Even when adopting a baby, it is
important to consider that the removal of a child from his or her biological
mother creates a traumatic event in the life of the child.” Grebenik provides a
diagram of the so-called “attachment cycle” that is solely a part of the
attachment myths system and in no way a part of attachment theory.

Grebenik’s statements vary between the deceptive and
the false. Certainly, young children are helpless to feed and care for themselves,
and for good development must have caregivers who will do these jobs and do
them well. However, it is a mistake to conflate good caregiving with the social
interactions that are the actual cause of emotional attachment to caregivers. This
aspect of attachment mythology adopts Sigmund Freud’s belief that children become
attached to familiar people because those people provide food, an idea that was
contradicted by Bowlby’s report, and the position of attachment theory, that
pleasant social interactions with an adult are the actual cause of a child’s
attachment to that adult.

Ordinarily, of course, caregivers who are neglectful
or abusive are also likely to fail in providing pleasurable social
interactions, and those who are attentive, sensitive, and responsive are also
likely to create pleasant social interactions with their babies. It is easy to
confuse these issues and to jump from care experiences to the social events
that create attachment. If Grebenik is going to write about these issues,
however, she should realize that it is deceptive to focus on satisfaction of
needs as a cause of attachment, when in fact social interactions are the
important factor here. Although events depicted in the “attachment cycle”
diagram are usually accompanied by the
important social interactions (which go unmentioned), the two are not the same
things. This may seem like nitpicking--
except for the fact that attachment mythologists often recommend
treatment of older children by attempts to re-enact the notional attachment
cycle, such as spoon- or bottle-feeding. Buying into attachment myths in this
way encourages parents and practitioners to choose forms of treatment that are
neither plausible nor demonstrably effective.

In referring to the removal of a child from the
biological mother as traumatic, Grebenik is again deceptive in her omission of
important details. Of course, separation from a familiar caregiver (biological
relative or not) is likely to be traumatic when two circumstances are present. The
first is that the child has already formed an attachment to a familiar person,
an event that does not occur before 6 months of age at the earliest. The second
is that the new caregiver is unavailable, insensitive, and unresponsive. (I
should note, by the way, that Bowlby did not consider, the second factor to be
important, but his colleague John Robertson demonstrated that it was.) If the
child is under 6 months old and is moved to a situation where a small number of
attentive adults give good care and are socially responsive, this does not appear
to be traumatic. Even an older child who is given sensitive, comforting care
will adjust well over time. However, a child old enough to have formed an
attachment, but too young to have developed good cognitive and language skills,
is likely to be traumatized if placed in the care of a busy, unavailable,
insensitive, and unresponsive caregiver. Children between 6 months and two
years of age are most likely to have the reaction that Grebenik appears to
ascribe to all children.

Let’s look at another FoF statement, at http://www.focusonthefamily.com/parenting/adoptive_families/wait-no-more/attachment-problems-up-close-and-personal.aspx.
Here, in a piece by Kelly and John Rosati, we see the advice that emerges
(logically but incorrectly) from the attachment myths described by Grebenik.
Here’s what they say about the advice given to adoptive parents of a baby,
whose age is not stated, but who was at the crawling stage. The adviser (an
adoptive parent, not a professional ) inquired whether the baby held his own
bottle, and whether when crawling toward an interesting object he looked back “to
show it to you”. When the parents replied Yes and No, respectively to these
questions, their adviser looked grave and announced that they were “in for
trouble” if they did not work to overcome these attachment deficits.

[Let me take a moment here to point out two things. The
first is that because there is no evidence that the “attachment cycle” described
earlier actually exists, there is no reason to think that holding or not
holding a bottle has any relevance to attachment. As for the second, the
adviser appears to be confusing two developmental steps. At about 10-12 months,
well-developed babies display “joint attention” by looking back and forth from
an interesting object to a caregiver, until they get the caregiver to look at
the object “with them”. This is not
usually considered a measure of attachment. The step this seems to have been
confused with is secure base behavior, in which a child exploring a strange
place or situation will occasionally make contact with a familiar person, by
coming back to the adult, by “checking back” with a look, or by calling to the
adult. Unless an interesting object was
also frightening, no one would expect a baby in a familiar setting to do much secure
base behavior as he or she explored. ]

What did the adviser then suggest? “…only John and I
should hold Daniel, and only I should feed him (not even John!). She told us
that we should never let him hold his own bottle; he needed to depend on me to
provide him with what he needed. … And then came the kicker: I needed to hold
him and be face-to-face with him for almost eight hours a day!”

This mother recognized the implausibility of the
advice-- although she apparently did not
think of the interference with Daniel’s normal mastery motivation and with the
eight hours of normal activity he would be missing, or of the training in
passivity that was being given here. Scared of the dire predictions of the
adviser, she did as she was told. “After several months of this therapeutic
parenting…Daniel began to make good eye contact… and was more engaged and more
emotionally connected with us”. The mother attributed the change she perceived
to the treatment given-- although in
fact one might well expect several more months in an adoptive family to be
accompanied by increasing maturity and attachment to the new caregivers.
(Indeed, I would ask whether those changes were actually slowed by the “therapeutic
parenting”!)

There you have it. “Focus on the Family”, an outfit
that draws many readers because of its religious and social positions, has bought
into a mythology of attachment that contradicts conventional attachment theory and that culminates
in diagnoses and treatment that are inaccurate and inappropriate. How about it,
FoF? Isn’t it time to replace the attachment myths with evidence-based material
about attachment--- and help rather than
hinder parents?

Friday, January 11, 2013

An e-mail last night from a friend who is on the
staff of a day-care center brought up a question that I have not seen addressed
until now: should we try to train preschool children to follow instructions to
escape from a shooter in the building? Elementary and high school kids are
drilled on what to do, and the cooperation of some of the children at Sandy
Hook seems to have saved their lives. Why not do the same for preschoolers? My
friend’s center is proposing to do this, but as she said, the idea does not
seem to “sit right”. And I had to agree with her about that.

Like all teachers and parents nowadays, day care
providers and preschool teachers have been forced to think about the impact of
events like the Newtown killings on the children they work with. The National
Association for the Education of Young Children—the primary standard- setting
and accrediting body for early childhood programs—has provided a list of
suggestions for helping young children feel more comfortable as they hear about
kids being hurt or killed (see www.naeyc.org/content/coping-school-shooting).
As far as I know, however, neither NAEYC nor any other organization has
proposed that young children participate in “shooter drills” that involve
running away and hiding, on cue.

Why is my friend’s center considering such drills?
It’s not a freestanding center, but operates under the administration of a
larger institution. The larger institution is responding to Newtown and other
events by developing plans for dealing with a “shooter”, and in the course of
this a member of the security staff--
father of a child at the day care center—has been assigned to develop a
plan and educate the staff and children. But I am afraid that like many people
who know little about early development, he has with the best of intentions
simply seized a method used with older children and “pulled it down” to be
applied to preschoolers. By doing so, he may be proposing a step that will not only
be ineffective in an emergency, but that may in itself be harmful and
disturbing to young children.

Let’s consider first how likely it is that a school
shooting will occur at all. Just over 80 school or mass shootings between 1996
and 2012 are listed at www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0777958.html
and this is the worldwide list. It includes shootings in malls, religious
buildings, and theaters as well as in schools. In other words, although
constant repetition on the news gives us the impression that school shootings
occur over and over, they are in fact quite unusual events, and a child is a
good deal more likely to die in a car accident -- or by being shot at home-- than in a school
shooting.

This doesn’t mean that we should not plan what to do
in all emergencies, but we need to balance the good we can achieve by any move
against the ill we may unintentionally cause by the same move. Just as it’s
wrong to think that “any psychotherapy is better than no psychotherapy”, it’s a
mistake to forget that our attempts to protect children can have unwanted side effects, especially if they
are not developmentally appropriate.

It seems hard for many people (including some parents)
to remember this, but preschool children are as different from school-age kids
as they are from infants. Preschoolers can seem very grown-up and often “talk a
good game”, using big vocabularies and doing a good imitation of adult
attitudes. But that’s when everything is going well. Let a 3-to-5-year-old feel
sick, get hurt, or feel threatened, and it all comes apart. Young children’s
natural response to distress is to hurry to a familiar adult and cling there.
If there’s no adult, other children are the goal. Overcoming that tendency with
drills is not very likely to be achieved. The more serious and intense the
adults are, the more the children want to stay with them, and the more the
children are likely to cry and become confused if pressed. Loud noises and screaming would increase their
tendency to stay close to their teacher rather than run away.

This suggests that “shooters drills” with
preschoolers are not likely to be effective in the very unlikely event of a
shooter appearing. And what would their probable side effects be? The essential
characteristic of a good day-care center or preschool is that the children feel
it to be a safe place. Feeling safe helps them overcome the well-known anxiety
that accompanies separation from parents even at this “advanced” age. Unless
young children feel secure in the presence of a familiar adult, their ability
to explore and learn is diminished. What happens then when we face them—either with
or without explanation-- with the idea
that they must run away and hide rather than staying where they feel safe? If
we explain the problem and introduce them to the idea that someone might come
and shoot them right here in their own classroom, we can certainly expect
repercussions, not only at school but in the form of fearfulness and sleep disturbances
at home. If we don’t explain, but just run them repeatedly through a drill that
will create concern and anxiety in the adults, the outcome can be
similar-- especially if the children are
not developmentally ready to do what the adults are urging them to do.

Expecting preschoolers to act to save themselves in
a shooting attack is somewhat like expecting them to recognize what a child
molester is doing and tell him “no”. Trying to teach young children these
things may make adults feel better, but that’s all the good it’s likely to
achieve-- and it may do harm.

I have an idea, though. If we want to protect young
children from being shot—at school, in their homes, or on the street—why don’t we
enact some serious gun control laws? It’s just a thought, but ya know, it’s so
crazy it just might work.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Adolescence is a difficult time in any child’s life, no matter
how well adjusted they may be. With their bodies changing and an increased
self-awareness, most young people struggle with a number of age-related issues
such as peer pressure, sibling rivalry, body image, self-esteem, depression,
relationships and anxiety over their future career and education.

As parents, it is our job to guide them through this
challenging period in their lives and make their transition from childhood to
adulthood as easy as possible.

Following are some tips and advice on ways to mentor your teen
and help them cope with all the pressures that come with growing up.

Be there for them

The best thing you could do as a parent is to be there for your
child when they need someone to talk to or even just a listening ear. Make sure
that your teen knows that you will always make time for them and encourage them
to share their hopes, dreams, worries and problems with you.

Be quick to praise but slow to judge, and always remind them
that they are valued and loved. Even teens who don’t seem too interested in
bonding with you once they reach a certain age will appreciate the fact that
you are making an effort to communicate and spend time with them.

Communication shouldn’t only happen when you are disciplining
them or when you think there may be a problem. It should be a daily occurrence,
even if it’s just a friendly chat about how their day went.

Try to connect on a regular basis by doing simple things
together, whether it’s preparing a meal, watching a TV show you don’t
particularly care for or agreeing to listen to their music in the car during a
long trip.

Don’t smother them with
your own expectations

It’s fine to encourage different hobbies, educational
achievements or career paths, but take care that you don’t weigh them with your
own expectations. Remember that the most important thing is for your child to
be happy and have the ability to express their individuality, even if it means
that they choose a style, boyfriend/girlfriend or career that you would not
have.

Most teens naturally rebel against their parents’ way of doing
things, and trying to force them down a certain path will likely only cause
them to run in the opposite direction.

Instead of smothering, allow them the freedom to choose their
own hairstyles, clothing, friends, education and career (unless, of course,
these are in some way unhealthy for them).

Don’t downplay their
problems

It’s easy to forget what it was like to be a teen once we grow
up and start dealing with other problems that we perceive to be more “real.”
However, as parents, we must be able to put ourselves in their shoes and think
back to what it was like to be a teenager; when a bout of acne before a school
dance seemed like the end of the world or the end of a two-day relationship
meant you would never love again.

It is important to acknowledge their problems and struggles, no
matter how small they may seem to us. Laughing it off or telling them that
“it’s not so bad” or that “it could be worse” is not helpful and will only
heighten their sense of being misunderstood.

Respect their privacy

It can be extremely tempting as a parent to meddle in every
aspect of your teenager’s life and justify such behavior by telling yourself
that you are doing it to keep them safe. However, not respecting your teen’s
privacy will prevent them from trusting you and could breed anger or resentment
later on in life.

There is a fine line between looking out for your child’s
wellbeing and snooping through their private life. Things like reading diaries,
logging into their social media accounts or listening in on private
conversations should be avoided at all costs.

If you are concerned about them or believe they are getting
involved in something dangerous, the best way to deal with it is to approach
them directly and ask them about it. Don’t be afraid to step in if need be, but
don’t go to unnecessary lengths to spy on them either.

Teach them what they need to know

As awkward as some things may be to bring up with your teen, it
is important to make sure that they have all the information they need on
important topics like relationships, safe sex, STDs, eating disorders and drugs
and alcohol.

Yes, they may cringe or tell you they don’t want to talk about
it or that they know all there is to know, but ignoring these issues or
assuming they will learn about it in school or from a friend could leave them
open to serious problems down the line.

If you don’t feel comfortable talking about these things with
them yourself, you may want to consider enlisting help from someone else, like
an aunt, uncle or close family friend, as teens often feel more comfortable
discussing such issues with someone who isn’t their mother or father.

Providing them with educational material is also a good way to
ensure that they are well-informed, without having to sit them down for “the
talk”.

About the author:

Jane Bongatois part of the team behind Open Colleges ( http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/) Australia’s
provider of child care courses (http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/childcare-certificate-and-diploma-courses.aspx). She is an early childhood educator with a background in psychology and for the past six years has
worked closely with special needs children. She enjoys reading, painting or
meeting friends during her spare time. (Find her on Google+)

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Yulia Massino, a Russian blogger, has called my
attention to the visit of Nancy Thomas, an advocate of Holding Therapy, to Russia
in 2012. Yulia is especially concerned about the possible influence of Thomas
because little of the U.S. criticism of
Thomas’ methods has been translated into Russian. Unless Russian parents are fluent
in English and have access to professional and other publications, they are unlikely
to be aware of the existence of serious concerns about Thomas’ claims.

Thanks to Google translate, it’s possible for
non-Russian-speakers to have a good look at http://attach2me.ru,
a web site offering material by Nancy Thomas and other proponents of Holding Therapy
to a Russian audience. Like other advertisements for the Holding Therapy belief
system, this one begins with an unusual definition of attachment as a desire
and ability to prolong emotional intimacy with another person, rather than one
of the more common definitions, like a preference for being near a person when
uncomfortable or threatened. It proceeds to describe a mental health diagnosis
called Reactive Attachment Disorder as including failure to make eye contact
except when lying and an interest in blood and gore--- none of which are part of Reactive Attachment
Disorder as defined by DSM-IV-TR or by ICD-10.

In a move typical of Holding Therapy proponents, http://attach2me.ru lists a peculiar mixture of
books that are all said to be “about attachment”. These include an important
volume by John Bowlby, the major theorist of attachment, and one by Bowlby and
Mary Ainsworth, his collaborator and
creator of the idea of differing qualities
of attachment. (Articles listed in another section are also primarily by
Bowlby.) In addition, however, the book
section includes translations of works by the Holding Therapy advocate Nancy
Thomas and by Gregory Keck and Regina Kupecky, authors well-known to support a
belief system that shares with Bowlby’s conventional system no more than a
handful of vocabulary words. Also listed is a translation of a book whose
senior author is Foster Cline, the erstwhile leader of the “rage-reduction
therapy” movement of the 1980s and 1990s, and like his colleague Thomas a
promoter of an attachment theory quite unrelated to Bowlby’s.

Two questions present themselves: What are the
differences between the Thomas/Keck/Cline view of the attachment and the conventional
attachment theory formulated by Bowlby? And, given that the two approaches are
mutually contradictory, why would proponents of one want to mention the other
approvingly?

The first question requires more details but is in
fact simpler to answer than the second. Here are some basic differences:

The
basic nature of attachment. For the Holding
Therapy (HT) group, attachment is an emotional transformation something
like religious conversion. Once done, it is difficult to undo or change,
but shapes relationships through life by determining not only trust and
intimacy, but obedience and gratitude to others. Disturbed attachment
results in psychopathic behavior, serial killing, and sexual inappropriateness.

From Bowlby’s
viewpoint, attachment is the formation of an early preference for familiar
caregivers and sense of security in their presence. As cognitive and emotional
development proceeds, existing attachments change toward more mature relationships, and new attachments
are formed. Early attachment experiences are one of several factors that determine
later social relations. Bowlby argued
that poor early attachment can result in delinquency, but did not relate early
experiences to later severe behavior problems.

The
timing of attachment processes. The HT group
considers attachment to exist prenatally as a result of some form of communication
between birth mother and unborn infant, but also to continue to develop
later. Newborns are thought to have a strong attachment to their birth
mothers and to suffer grief and rage if separated (e.g.by adoption).

Bowlby’s theory of
attachment focuses on social interactions with a small number of caregivers in
the second half of the first year as critical to attachment, but assumes that
new attachments can develop in the second year and later. Newborns (that is,
infants in the first month after birth) are not thought to have attachment or
to experience suffering if separated from their birth mothers.

How
attachment occurs. The HT theory of attachment
holds that this emotional commitment of the child increases through the
first year insofar as caregivers can satisfy the child’s needs. (Infants
with serious health problems are thought to fail in attachment if
caregivers cannot comfort them.) The experience of need followed by
gratifications presented by caregivers is referred to as the “first-year attachment
cycle”, a concept absent from conventional views of attachment. Attachment
is thought to be advanced and perfected during the second year of life
when caregivers set limits on children’s behavior.

Bowlby’s theory of
attachment focuses entirely on pleasant social interactions with familiar
caregivers as the cause of attachment and the related sense of security with familiar
people. Attachment is more difficult if caregivers are indifferent or
unpleasant, or if the child has too many changes of caregiver.

How
attachment problems are thought to be treated. The
HT approach is based on the assumption stated in the last paragraph, that
attachment occurs because of satisfaction of physical needs and because of
limit-setting. HT methods, especially those sometimes referred to as “Nancy
Thomas parenting”, aim at re-enacting the events HT advocates believe are
responsible for early growth of attachment to caregivers. In order to
satisfy a child’s physical needs, it is essential to be sure that these
needs exist and can only be gratified through the intervention of the
caregiver or proposed attachment figure. Children are forbidden or
prevented from efforts to help themselves in age-appropriate ways like
preparing food or using the toilet at will. The child’s diet is limited in
amount and variety (one Russian adoptee in the U.S., Viktor Matthey, was
apparently fed on uncooked grains), leading to malnutrition and weight
loss; he or she may be made to sleep in a cold room; and toilet use is
available only with the stated permission of the caregiver. Along with
actual “holding” treatment, these methods are thought to prepare the child
for a new attachment, which is cemented by means such as extended mutual
gaze, rocking and cuddling of older children as well as younger, and
hand-feeding of milky sweets in apparent imitation of the provision of milk from the breast. As all behavior
problems are thought to be based on poor attachment, these methods are
expected to help with all difficulties.

Conventional child psychotherapies
based on Bowlby’s theory, such as Robert Marvin’s “Circle of Security”, focus
on increasing parents’ and children’s communications with each other, so
parents become more aware of children’s cues showing that they need comfort and
security, and children in turn have improved social experiences. Specific
problem behaviors like speech delays are
treated in conventional ways and are not linked particularly with attachment
history.

Safety
and effectiveness. A number of cases of harm to
children have been associated with HT and “Nancy Thomas parenting”, but no
such association has occurred with conventional treatment. HT methods have
no foundation in systematic evidence, but several conventional methods are
evidence-based.

It is abundantly clear
that the HT approach is vastly different in its assumptions about attachment
than the conventional attachment theory developed by John Bowlby. Why, then,
would http://attach2me.ru list together a
series of books that contradict each other? The best explanation appears to be
that the HT group wish to gain acceptance by “riding the coattails” of a major
conventional psychological theory and associating themselves with a name that
has been heard by every introductory psychology student for the last 40 years
or so. Not guilt, but respect, by association is the goal of the promulgators
of http://attach2me.ru. They’ve tried the
same thing in the United States, but here they have met again and again with
critical rejection by major professional groups. What a new frontier Russia
must be for them-- a Promised Land where
few have yet heard about the reality of HT, and most can’t read the endless
criticisms of the method! Let’s hope that Pavel Astakhov takes note of what may
be happening to Russian children in their own country.

N.B. I believe I’ve heard that Jirina Prekopova is
also making some approaches to Russia. What a Battle of the Titans that might
be--- NT versus JP--- which can restrain
the other longer?

Sunday, January 6, 2013

The “mother tongue” or the “cradle language”-- that’s what we call our earliest, and usually
most fluent, language. We learn about its words and grammar from our earliest
caregivers, of course, but for quite a while people have been suspecting that
some features of languageare learned
before birth as well as after.

Like other sensitivities to touch stimulation,
hearing-- the result of bending of
hair-like cells in the inner ear—is well-developed before birth. Although human
beings are specialized for hearing sound waves traveling through air, we can
pick up sounds moving through water, or even through the earth (how they hear
the stampede coming in cowboy movies, right?). This means it’s not so
surprising that some sound waves resulting from speech can travel through a
pregnant woman’s body and through the amniotic fluid to cause responses in the
ears of an unborn baby even several months before birth.

But, so what if this does happen? Do those speech sound
waves have any effect on the baby’s development, any more than do other sounds
like a car starting, a dog barking, or mother’s teeth being brushed? The fact
that something can happen doesn’t mean it does
happen, so back in the 1980s researchers started looking to see whether
newborns showed any effects of systematic speech sound experiences in the weeks
before birth.

Well-known studies by DeCasper and others in the ‘80s
had mothers-to-be record their voices reading either The Cat in the Hat or a similar-sounding story, The Dog in the Fog. The women did not
know at the time they recorded which story they would later be asked to “read
to their bellies” so the developing fetus could hear. Stories were randomly
assigned and read repeatedly over the last weeks of the pregnancies. After they
were born, the babies were allowed to listen to both stories and could control
which one they heard by sucking on an artificial nipple. They spent more time
listening to the story they had heard prenatally than to the other, very
similar story, suggesting that they had been learning as they listened.

But there is an oddity in these results. The
evidence is clear that the babies could tell the difference between the
familiar and the unfamiliar sounds, and they showed us this by choosing to
listen for a longer time to one story than they did to the other. But… newborn
babies don’t usually pay more attention to familiar than to unfamiliar things,
the way older babies and adults often do. Newborn babies show a tendency to habituate to things they’ve seen or
heard before. After paying attention to familiar things briefly, they stop
paying attention to them, and spend much more time attending to unfamiliar
sights or sounds. The extent to which newborns do this is correlated with their
later cognitive development. Yet DeCasper and his colleagues reported that the
newborns in their study paid more attention to the sounds they had heard
before. What was this about? Was it that because those sounds were not heard
through the mothers’ tissues and amniotic fluid, they seemed a lot different
from what they had been, and were thus “changed” and unfamiliar even though
they were the same words? Or, perhaps, did the mothers who were reading “to
their babies” speak differently than those who were reading for a recording?

In a recent study by Christine Moon, Hugo
Lagercrantz, and Patricia Kuhl (Moon,
C., Lagercrantz, H., Kuhl, P.K. (2013). Language experienced in utero affects vowel perception after
birth: A two-country study. Acta
Paediatrica. doi: 10.1111/apa.12098), babies born in the United States and
babies born in Sweden were compared to see whether they preferred (i.e., sucked
more in order to hear) vowels characteristic of speech in the U.S. or Swedish
vowels. In each country, the newborns were more attentive to the vowels that
they had not heard prenatally.
Newborns in the U.S. preferred to listen to Swedish vowel sounds, and Swedish
babies preferred to listen to U.S. vowels sounds. As we would predict from
their tendency to habituate, the babies paid more attention to the unfamiliar
than the familiar vowel sounds. These results seem to be at odds with the
DeCasper work, unless there’s some explanation like the ones I suggested in the
previous paragraph.

To understand how infants’ mental abilities develop,
it’s really important to know what can happen before birth, but at the same
time to be aware of what probably does not happen until later. It’s also
critical to remember that although great minds may think alike, newborns and
older individuals don’t necessarily do so. The Internet abounds with comments
from people who want to interpret young infants’ responses to speech in terms
of what adults do or like… for example,
suggesting that learning from speech prenatally means that newborns have
already established communication with their birth mothers in a sophisticated way.

Interpreting newborn behavior as if it involved the
same motivations and abilities as adult actions is sometimes called adultomorphism, a made-up word derived
from “anthropomorphism” (acting as if
animals have the same intentions and motives as humans). One highly
adultomorphic thought pattern assumes that newborns long for the familiar and
feel uncomfortable with the new and unfamiliar, as older children and adults
often do. This type of adultomorphism gave rise to the idea that birth is an
emotionally traumatic separation from the familiar and comfortable “communion”
of fetus with mother-- an idea that is
purely speculative, and no more logical than the guess that the child at the
time of birth is bored silly and wants to get out and have a look around.

But what
infant behavior actually shows us is that for several months after birth babies
are fascinated by the unfamiliar. For several months after that, they remain
cordially responsive to friendly new people and interesting new situations. By
the seventh or eighth month, they start to be wary of new people and things,
and take a while to warm up to them. After eight or nine months – when attachment
becomes evident in most babies-- they
may be frankly frightened of new people and things, avoid them, and come to
terms with them best when encouraged and supported by familiar caregivers in a
familiar place. Strange though this behavior may seem to the inexperienced
observer, in fact the baby is now much more like an adult than he or she was at
birth. Like us, older babies are most likely to pay most attention to familiar
sights and sounds and to learn from them. Just try changing The Cat in the Hat to The Dog
in the Fog and you’ll see what I mean.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

The Russian ban on adoption of children to the United
States has been the subject of a number of articles and an editorial in the New
York Times over Christmas week of
2012. The Duma, the Russian parliament, passed legislation prohibiting adoption
of Russian children to the U.S., and President Vladimir Putin signed the bill.
The Times and other U.S. sources attributed
the ban to Russian reprisal against the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. attempt to
censure Russians for human rights violations. The Duma attributed it to the
fact that 19 Russian-born children have died in adoptive homes in the U.S. Curiously, however, the bill was named for Dima
Yakovlev, whose tragic death in a hot car was one of the few that were clearly
accidental rather than the result of systematic maltreatment. Like the Times, members of the Duma seem uninformed
about the situations that probably gave rise to most of these deaths--- situations that may have been encouraged by
adoption caseworkers in this country. (See

http://www.vesti.ru which for some reason won’t let me type the
whole thing---- add to this /doc.html?id=990 and then 898 [mysteriously, it seems to lock on me after
the 990]). I believe, however, that Pavel Astakhov, the Russian Children’s
Ombudsman, has some awareness of what has been happening.

Readers who have been following the Russian-American
adoption situation for some time will realize that concerns about intercountry
adoption have existed for years. An article by Jaci Wilkening in an Ohio law
journal (http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/oslj/files/2012/01/Wilkening.pdf)
summarizes a good deal of the history and addresses some-- but not all—of the problems that need to be
dealt with in order to protect both parents and children. (For example,
Wilkening stresses the return of seven-year-old Artyom to Russia, rather than
serious cases of maltreatment and starvation.)

In 1994, the U.S. signed onto the Hague Convention
on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption.
In 2000, this agreement was ratified through the Intercountry Adoption Act, but
was not enacted through the promulgation of regulations until 2008. Both the
Hague Convention and the IAA emphasize pre-adoption services, the appointment
of a Central Authority in the receiving country (in the U.S., the Department of State),
assessment of the prospective adoptive parents, and appropriate counseling of
the adoptive parents on the child’s history and cultural background, medical issues,
developmental history, and so on.

The IAA Regulations did not address post-adoption
services, or significantly, post-adoption reporting, although a number of
sending countries require such reports. According to Wilkening’s paper, Russia has
required post-adoption reports 6 months, 12 months, 24 months, and 36 months
after the adoption. China requires adoptive parents to state their willingness
to provide reports as asked. Ethiopian law requires reports after 3 months, 6
months, one year, and annually until the
child is 18. Reports until age 18 have also been requested by Vietnam, Ukraine,
and Kazakhstan.

In 2011, an agreement (Agreement Between the United
States of America and the Russian Federation Regarding Cooperation in Adoption
of Children; http://tsgsandbox.his.com/adoptions/content/pdf/us-russia_adoption_agmt-713%2011-signed_english.pdf)
was signed and to come into force in October 2012. This agreement again
stressed pre-adoption counseling and education, but also required that adopted
children remain citizens of Russia while also receiving U.S. citizenship,
addressed issues of dissolution of adoptions and re-adoption, and required that
this all be performed by a competent authority as defined in the agreement. The
child is also to be registered with a consular office and regular reports are
to be sent, especially if requested..

As Wilkening points out, however, the U.S. State
Department has no power to enforce compliance by adoptive parents, and is
considered as showing good will if it encourages compliance. She stresses the
need for post-adoptive services but appears to focus primarily on the rights of
adoptive parents to receive a child with the characteristics they expected rather
than to have medical or other surprises. The solution Wilkening proposes is to
strengthen the authority of the State Department in these matters-- although she acknowledges the dislike of
American adoptive families for reporting or being monitored in ways that are
outside historical guidelines in U.S. family law.

Wilkening also comments on both mental health
concerns and developmental or neurological disabilities as points that demand
much more post-adoption attention. Interestingly, she stresses the potential
mental health problems of institutionalized children rather than the possibility
that adoptive parents may have mental health difficulties triggered by
adoption, just as perinatal mood disorders like post-partum depression may be
triggered by the birth of a child. In fact, post-adoption mental health
services may be as necessary for adoptive parents or for other children in a
family as they are for the adopted child. Wilkening’s paper also cites the
testimony of “a doctor” (in fact, the
psychologist Ronald Federici) before Congess, in which he reported that 80% of
foreign-adopted children he had evaluated were neuropsychiatrically impaired.
This appears to be a PFA number---
Pulled From the Air-- but in any
case is irrelevant unless we also know how many children he evaluated, and how
that number compares with all foreign-born adoptees including those whose
parents did not see a need for evaluation. As was the case for mental illness, Wilkening’s
statement here seems incomplete, and it appears to me that improved pre-adoption
services would be more to the point than more post-adoption services--- especially if the assumption is that adoptive
parents are accepting seriously at-risk children out of inadequate counseling
and education.

Like the Times
statements, Wilkening’s article put little stress on the number of Russian and
other foreign-adopted children who have died as a result of systematic
maltreatment, and on the very real possibility that such maltreatment is
advised as “attachment therapy” by caseworkers. A common feature of these child
deaths is severe undernutrition, advised by “attachment therapists” and parent
coaches like Nancy Thomas as a way to establish the dominance of the adoptive
parent and thus (according to this belief system) to cause emotional attachment
and the obedience and gratitude these people consider to follow as natural
consequences of attachment. Examination of curricula for adoption workers and
statements of parent organizations show that this approach, with its real potential
for child injury or death, is rife in the United States.

What would the United States have to do to keep safe
adopted children, from Russia or elsewhere? An essential step would be an
independent examination of curricula used for the education and counseling of
prospective adoptive parents. Currently, organizations that are said to be “competent
authorities” are allowed to create their own curricula, certainly a task the
State Department does not want to take on. Independent assessment of the
curricula by knowledgeable scholars outside the “authorities” would reveal
whether adoptive parents are actually being given unconventional and dangerous
misinformation that will make them more likely to harm the children. A similar examination of the training of
adoption caseworkers would also be in order, as only a few years ago a major
social work textbook stated approval of “holding therapy”. An additional step
that could be very helpful is to ban homeschooling for foreign-adopted
children, because contacts with schools and other community organizations can
act as buffers against mistreatment, especially underfeeding.

Unfortunately, there remains a puzzling issue, one
that is difficult to explain to the more centralized Russian Federation. This
is the multiplicity of levels of services and law enforcement in the United
States-- and the more than occasional
conflicts between state and federal levels. For instance, in the case of Maxim
Babaev (http://voicerussia.com/2012_12_23/Russian-Children-Sexually-Abused-Suffocated-by-US-Adoptive-Parents-Russian-Diplomat/),
a Florida judge refused to allow the Russian consul contact with a 6-year-old
adoptee who had been removed from abusive parents and placed in a foster home,
saying he knew nothing about the bilateral agreement and did not have to
cooperate with it.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.